And today’s feel-good story of the day comes all the way from down in Theodore, Alabama. One of most, if not the most, right wing leaning states of the union.

A 62-year-old Marine Corps veteran who is currently battling colon cancer heard a knock on his door this past Thursday afternoon. As he went to answer it he had no clue he was about to have the fight of his life. Three thugs who were attempting to rob him shot him through his door window. The thugs used a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot which is normally used for hunting deer. This type of ammo thankfully isn’t as deadly to people as other types of ammo that can be used in a 12 gauge shotgun are.

The retired Marine Michael Irving was hit and quickly reached for his own gun. He shot the shooter, but as he lay on the ground one of his two other accomplices reached for the shotgun, so he shot that thug too. The second thug he had just shot begged Irvine not to shoot him again, so he replied to him to drop the gun. The punk didn’t so Irvin shot him again. After shooting both he looked over and saw a third punk trying to shoot him with a handgun that had fortunately jammed, so he shot her too. Now that’s what I call a fun afternoon don’t you think?

A Marine Corps veteran is telling FOX10 News how he got out of a violent burglary alive.

It’s a follow up to a story we brought you as breaking news Thursday night, when a homeowner shot three suspected burglars in Theodore after they shot him first.

The homeowner is 62-year-old Michael Irving. FOX10 News Reporter Devan Coffaro sat down with him once he got home from the hospital Friday afternoon.

“I didn’t even know them,” said Irving. “Why me? Why shoot me?”

Irving was still in disbelief as he walked into his home — blood still covered the ground, and there was a bullet hole in both his door and his arm.

For him, the last 24-hours have been almost unreal, and it all started with a tap on his door.

“I walked right here to open the door, and that’s when he shot me right there. They cut loose on me, and that’s when I went to the cabinet here and back behind the coffee was an old time pistol,” said Irving. “I opened the door and smoked ’em.”

Mobile County Sheriff’s deputies say on the other side of that door armed with a shotgun and a handgun were Chasatie Dulabhan, Casey Ray Gann, and Joseph Heathcock. Investigators say it was an attempted robbery, and clearly they chose the wrong house. Irving managed to shoot and injure all three of them.

“I tried not to shoot any of them in the chest. I didn’t want to have to kill ’em.”

Two of the suspects fled and left one woman behind, but they didn’t make it very far. They eventually had to stop at a Dollar General two miles away and wait for help. All three suspects were first taken to the hospital for their injuries and then arrested.

As for Irving, he’s being hailed as a local hero for defending himself. He was outnumbered, outgunned, and has been battling colon cancer for the past two years. He says you never mess with a former Marine.

“I learned that in the Marine Corps – ‘react and do’ before you get scared,” said Irving.

He was robbed a few weeks ago, targeted for his cancer medication. Deputies believe that robbery was committed by at least one of the same three suspects.

After that incident, Irving installed new Plexiglass on his door — something he believes helped save his life.

“Where the bullet hole is, you can see how thick that glass is and that’s what saved me, because it slowed down the buckshot enough.”

Irving says someone up above must have been watching over him.

“If I hadn’t of moved just a little bit, it would have hit me in the chest and sternum and caught me in the heart.”

All three robbery suspects are in Metro Jail.

So far, only Heathcock and Gann have been in court and a judge denied bond for both of them. Heathcock is charged with robbery, assault 2nd, and shooting into an occupied building. Gann is charged with robbery. Dulabhan is charged with burglary, robbery, assault 2nd, and shooting into an occupied building.

Deputies say they are still looking for a fourth male suspect who may have been the getaway driver.

The suspects are confirmed to be 19-year-old Joseph Heathcock and 29-year-old Casey Ray Gann, who were both denied bail. And 24-year-old Chasatie Dulabhan who still remains in the hospital with none life threatening injuries. Authorities said they are actively searching for a fourth suspect in the case who was apparently driving the getaway car.

Moral of the story, don’t mess with a United States Marine, no matter how old or sick that Marine may be!

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Prominent Muslim Surgeon Just Arrested By NYPD Seconds Before Unleashing Horrid Plan On Innocent – Here’s What He Was Doing

A well known orthopedic surgeon in his quest to carry out the next 9/11 has now been charged with trying to plan a Manhattan terror plot.

But here is where things get even direr; He is already under arrest for the ISIS-linked abduction and beheadings of two Filipino workers.

Dr. Russell Salic will be facing charges in the horrific Philippines attacks before authorities even agree to extradite the terrorist to face charges in the United States. Filipino Chief State Counsel Ricardo Paras said a court in Manila was considering the transfer request from the U.S. government regarding the new allegations which were made public Friday, October 13th.

Musa Muhammad stands at the site where 400 Islamist militants launched an invasion of the southern Philippine city of Zamboanga little over two years ago, sparking 20 days of heavy fighting with security forces. The ruins of his old house can be found there, amid several hundred other razed homes. Since then his family has lived in a sports stadium, refusing to move to a newly built house in another part of town.

The Real-Life Hogwarts Express Just Rescued a Family Stranded in Scotland
The Moros (“Moors”), as the Muslims of the southern Philippine region of Mindanao are called, are known for their intransigence. For centuries, they fought the Spanish, Americans and Japanese for their independence. Today, they are fighting Manila too. Some 120,000 people have died, and millions have been displaced, in the past 40 years of insurgency. (Muddying the picture, a separate communist insurgency is also sporadically waged in parts of Mindanao by the New People’s Army, which is thought to consist of some 3,200 fighters.)

Yet many Moros, like Musa, are not victims of a heavy-handed central government but the casualties of infighting among their own kin. The battle at Zamboanga, which led to the destruction of Musa’s home, started off when factions of one rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front, wanted to signal their displeasure with the peace negotiations with Manila then being carried out by another rebel group, Moro Islamic Liberation Front. It took 3,000 troops to end the rebel occupation of several districts of the city, in an operation that saw 51 insurgents killed and drove 70,000 people from their homes.

Now those talks have stalled and, in the frustrated void that has followed their collapse, extremism has taken root. Several Moro outfits have pledged allegiance to terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) and carried out attacks in its name.

One of those groups is the Abu Sayyaf militia, whose head Isnilon Hapilon — now styled Sheik Mujahid Abu Abdullah al-Filipini — has been appointed ISIS’s leader in the Philippines. Presently, the Philippine army is attempting to strike at the group’s jungle stronghold on the island of Basilan. In one of the bloodiest days for the armed forces in years, 18 soldiers were killed and over 50 wounded on April 9. ISIS claimed responsibility for the killings. Shortly after, Abu Sayyaf beheaded two Filipino hostages.

“It’s very likely that [Abu Sayyaf] will declare a satellite of the caliphate in the coming year,” says Rohan Gunaratna, an international terrorism expert at S. Rajaratnam School of Security Studies in Singapore. “Once that is done, it will be much more difficult to dismantle these groups.”

Already, up to 1,200 Southeast Asians have joined ISIS in the Middle East. Experts now worry that an ISIS stronghold in the southern Philippines will act as a regional lure, providing extremists from across Asia with a place to gain combat experience, before they set act to attack Asian targets or even targets further afield. The Jakarta attack in January that killed four civilians is just a taste of what could come, says Greg Barton, chair in global Islamic politics at Deakin University in Melbourne.

“Next time they won’t mess around with pistols but bring assault rifles,” says Barton. “That’s all it takes to turn amateurs into a lethal bunch of killers.”

Some claim that the biggest threat currently is that competing, ISIS-inspired groups would seek to upstage each other with small-scale attacks. However, organized, international networks still exist, even if the influence of al-Qaeda, which once funded training camps in the southern Philippines, has waned, along with that of its affiliates.

Indonesian operatives are already trading Syria-hardened tutors for weapons and training grounds in Mindanao, reports the ISIS Study Group, an intelligence collective run by the Washington, D.C., think tank Center for a New American Security. The area is evidently attracting insurgents from further afield too. Mohammad Khattab, an alleged bombmaking instructor from Morocco, was reportedly among the five killed militants on Basilan earlier in April. There have been rumors of Muslim Uighurs from China in the area. And in January last year, Zulkifli bin Hir — a Malaysian described as a key facilitator between Indonesian and Filipino extremist groups — was cornered and killed in Mamasapano in central Mindanao, but at the cost of 44 deaths among the Philippine army’s Special Action Force. Five civilians also lost their lives in an operation that turned the tide of support against President Benigno Aquino III’s peace negotiations with the Moro separatists.

“Before the Mamasapano tragedy, it looked really promising,” says Richard Javad Heydarian, a security expert at De La Salle University in Manila. “There were even rumors that Aquino would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately a lot of journalists sensationalized the story, fanning anti-Muslim sentiment. Politicians running for office have then been trying to score political points on this.”

Further talk of a new, autonomous province within the Philippines for the Moro — it would be called Bangsamoro — has now been suspended until the general elections in May. In the meantime, says terrorism expert Gunaratna, intolerance is putting down deeper roots. As an example, he points to the March 1 assassination attempt on a Saudi cleric, Aaidh al-Qarni. The preacher, who has been on ISIS hit lists, was shot while visiting Western Mindanao State University in Zamboanga for a two-day symposium.“Recent arrests in Malaysia and Indonesia clearly show that a new terror attack from ISIS in the region is imminent,” Gunaratna warns. “And the next one will be bloodier.”

The Philippines is extremely crucial to American national security and foreign policy in Asia. The country is a former U.S. colony with has deep historical and cultural ties to the United States, plus it boasts being the world’s 12th largest country by population. It enjoys a lively democracy and the region’s fastest-growing economy with an abundant trade and investment relationship with the United States. But sadly Isis knows this and since they don’t have the security infrastructure we have here in the United States we can now see Isis making its move to infiltrate and turn the nation into a hotbed of Radical Islam. To the point where they are actually planning attacks there to import to the states.

Although the Phillippines is a staunch military ally of the United States they still suffer from much corruption and Isis just “pays” its way in. And to make matters worse in 2014 former President Barack Hussein Obama dissolved the joint terrorism unit both nations had created in the Phillippines in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Thug Promises To Assassinate Trump On VIDEO If He Doesn’t Do One Thing For Him Within 24 Hrs – Backfires Immediately

Louisiana rapper and all around thug, Maine Muzik, has threatened to kill President Donald Trump because he’s afraid he will take his “momma’s food stamps,” which former President Barack Hussein Obama promised them. On the same week, though Muzik was visited by secret service for posting a video to his Instagram account where he, and a gang of thugs, showed off a stockpile of weapons, he released the video threatening Trump.

Yes, folks, this is what it’s come to, the Baton Rouge Louisiana resident Demarcus Davis who goes by “Maine Musik” in the “hood” says he’s going to go to war against the president with his arsenal of guns and hand grenades if Trump takes away his mom’s food stamps. Or makes her work for the benefits.

Some 40 years after the so-called “war on poverty” was begun by liberal Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson, not only has poverty not been eliminated, but in terms of the percentage of the American population living in poverty, it has actually increased.

Yet, utopian master planners in government and public policy insist that the “war” must go on, as evidenced by the massive number of Americans added to public assistance rolls since Barack Obama became president.

Welfare growing much faster than work

In fact, despite the president’s claims that his policies are creating “good-paying jobs,” the opposite is true, and the proof is in the numbers. According to The Weekly Standard, which cited government statistics compiled by the office of U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.):

With the latest jobs report, it is now the case that “Under Obama, Food Stamp Growth [Is] 75 Times Greater Than Job Creation,” according to statistics compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee. “For Every Person Added to Jobs Rolls Since January 2009, 75 People Added To Food Stamp Rolls.”

Since Obama took office in January of 2009, a net of just 194,000 new jobs have been created (that’s “net” – the difference between jobs gained and jobs lost). During that same period, the committee report noted, 14.7 million people have been added to the food stamp rolls.

“Simply put, the President’s policies have not produced jobs. During his time in office, 14.7 million people were added to the food stamp rolls. Over that same time, only 194,000 jobs were created – thus 76 people went on food stamps for every one that found a job,” says Sessions, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee. “This is a product of low growth. Post-recession economic growth in 2010 was 2.4 percent, and dropped in 2011 to 1.8 percent. This year it has dropped again to 1.77 percent. Few, if any, net jobs will be created with growth of less than 2 percent.”

The report put these dismal figures into perspective:

In January 2009, there were 133.56 million Americans with jobs and 31.98 million on food stamps. Today, there are 133.76 million Americans with jobs and 46.68 million on food stamps. The employment rolls have thus grown by 0.15 percent and the food stamp rolls have grown by 46 percent, meaning that for every one American who found a job, 75 Americans signed up for food stamps. Meanwhile, during that time, our nation’s debt has risen $5.63 trillion. Total spending on food stamps is now more than $80 billion annually, a fourfold increase from 2001. Total spending on federal means-tested welfare – food stamps, public housing, social services, cash aid, etc. – is now approximately $1 trillion. That amount is enough, if converted to cash, to send every household beneath the federal poverty line an annual check for $60,000.

Obama likes to brag about what he hasn’t done – created a good economy

Obama likes to say his administration has created millions of jobs. But while that is true on its face, when you compare jobs created to what has been lost, the figure is far, far lower. Pathetic, in fact. During the Reagan recovery, over the eight years of his presidency, 20 million net new jobs were created, the biggest period of growth in U.S. history.

“Overall, in the last four years, the United States’ gross federal debt has increased 53 percent, food stamp enrollment has increased 46 percent, and the number of employed persons has increased just 0.15 percent,” the report said. “This picture, however, is even more ominous than it looks. While only 194,000 net jobs have been created since 2009, the working age population has increased by approximately 5 million – almost 25 times that amount.

“In other words, a shrinking share of working age adults have or are even looking for a job. The real unemployment number (U-6), therefore, is 14.6 percent,” it said.

That’s the true nature of the Obama economy: More welfare, fewer jobs, less opportunity.

This is what happens when Liberal Democrats get a hold of a society. Barry Soetoro, along with the Democrat Congress decided it was a great idea to make getting government help even easier than it already was. They removed the law which President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich worked together to pass which made it harder to get welfare. By removing that law Obama once again turned our government into a free for all give me entity. Now people don’t need to even try to get work to get government help, and they can get it for life.

Obama, in fact, turned receiving welfare and food stamps into a career choice, one that President Trump needs to get control of. I guess the Democrats never learned Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote, “A government big enough to give you everything is also big enough to take it all away!”

As we reach the two-week mark in the Las Vegas shooting mystery. Americans find themselves still asking, even more, questions as to what happened on that tragic night where 58 people lost their lives and over 500 were injured. In the midst of a range of theories and conspiracies, this week multiple internet sleuths noted the proximity between a United States ally’s government during both this terrorist attack and the 9/11 attacks. Saudi Arabia!

For who knows what reason Saudi Arabia is still being considered a close United States ally and friend. Although they are notorious for their human rights violations and hatred towards the west.

But this is where the story gets even more interesting, in 2007 Saudi’s Kingdom Holding Company actually bought 45 percent of the stock in the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts which owns the Mandalay Bay Casino and Resorts. And to add to the mystery, 45 percent of additional stock is owned by Cascade Investment Management. Which is a company controlled by none other than the extreme far leftist, Bill Gates. And interestingly enough both these companies teamed up in 2010 to work together in order to make the Four Seasons a privately held company.

In Las Vegas, the top six floors of the Mandalay Bay Hotel are owned by the Four Seasons. This hotel became the subject of a deadly terror attack when suspect Stephen Paddock reportedly opened fire out of the windows of his suite on the 32nd floor, sending a spree of bullets down to a crowd of around 22,000 people at a music festival across the street.

While it may have been pure coincidence that a man intent on carrying out a massacre, happened to rent a hotel room near a floor owned by the Saudi Royal Family, there is one important factor: When the Saudi Air Force visited Las Vegas recently, they did not stay at Mandalay Bay—the hotel in which they own 45 percent of the top six floors.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that a “Middle East Air Force” booked the entire W Las Vegas hotel for the month of August, and sources noted that it was the Royal Saudi Air Force. This raises the question of why the members did not stay at the Four Seasons at Mandalay Bay, when half of the stock is owned by the kingdom, and it is typically their location of choice.

The question of whether Saudi Arabia could be involved stems from President Trump’s leniency towards the U.S. ally, and from the questions of Saudi Kingdom involvement that arose after 9/11.

As The Free Thought Project reported, in July, a federal judge in Miami reversed her decision to push for the release of crucial documents revealing information on the funding of the 9/11 attacks. The information, which stemmed from a 2002 FBI report, is said to have included evidence of “many connections” between the Saudi family and “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.”

It was also revealed last year, after the infamous 28-pages were declassified, that the Saudi government aided the 9/11 terrorists.

Couple all this with the fact that two weeks later the mystery of this shooting is nowhere near being explained this whole episode starts to reak of a conspiracy. What is even more concerning is how Saudi Arabia always seems to be in the middle of messes like this, just like in 9/11 where that nation trained and partially funded the 9/11 hijackers while the official word from the “Kindom” was that they had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Maybe we should have invaded Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq!

This month, Saudi Arabia launched massive military exercises that underscore its recent offer to send ground forces to fight against ISIS as part of a U.S.-led coalition. While Riyadh and Washington share the objective of destroying ISIS, our counterterrorism priorities are not always aligned. Therefore, Riyadh’s recent moves justify a re-examination of whether and when the Saudis can serve as reliable partners in combating violent Islamic extremism. Despite allegations that the monarchy has directly supported violent extremists such as al-Qaeda, there is no public evidence supporting this charge. However, Saudi Arabia’s mixed record on combating terrorist financing over the past 15 years reveals that Riyadh is more concerned with its domestic security and regional feuds than it is focused on combating global terrorism.

U.S.-Saudi Mistrust After 9/11

After it was revealed that 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001 were Saudis, the Saudi government and royal family were the targets of multiple lawsuits by employers and families of the victims. Prominent U.S. lawmakers also indicated concerns about Saudi Arabia. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) observed that the United States “in some ways, have had a good relationship with [the Saudis] over the years, and in other ways, it appears as if they’re funding our enemies.” Amid legislative proposals to compel Saudi cooperation, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) criticized Riyadh for a “well-documented history of suborning terrorist financing and ignoring the evidence when it comes to investigating terrorist attacks on Americans.” A December 2002 report by the House and Senate intelligence committees investigated these issues, but 28 still-classified pages related to Saudi Arabia resulted in controversy over whether Washington protectedSaudi government figures.

Despite such controversy, the 9/11 Commission Report “found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded [al Qaeda].” However, the Commission also noted that “Saudi Arabia has been a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism. At the level of high policy, Saudi Arabia’s leaders cooperated with American initiatives aimed at the Taliban or Pakistan before 9/11. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s society was a place where al Qaeda raised money directly from individuals and through charities.” The Report states that although it did not find evidence to incriminate Riyadh, “This conclusion does not exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al Qaeda.”

Before the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi royal family had long shied away from cracking down on private donors and foundations linked to terrorist financing, primarily to avoid confrontation with the powerful ultra-conservative clerics in the kingdom and their followers. After 9/11, Riyadh remained reluctant to help the U.S. Treasury Department dismantle international terror funding networks with links to donors and foundations in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia Steps Up After New Terror Threats in the Kingdom

Saudi Arabia’s complacency was rocked in 2003-2006 after a series of significant attacks within the kingdom claimed dozens of lives and demonstrated to Saudi citizens and rulers that al Qaeda posed a direct threat to Saudi Arabia’s stability. This development propelled Riyadh to dramatically strengthen its policies and enforcement to stop terrorist financing stemming from within the kingdom. Testifying before the Senate in 2005, U.S. Treasury Deputy Assistant Secretary Daniel L. Glaser stated, “Today, Saudi Arabia is actively countering the threat of terrorism. This is a key success, unfortunately catalyzed by the May 2003 terrorist attacks in Riyadh, which alerted the kingdom that terrorism was not only a theoretical global problem, but very much a local one.”

With aggressive arrests and widespread crackdowns on financing and operating of terrorist cells, as well as efforts to better train police and monitor mosques as part of a wide-ranging counterterrorism program, the Saudi government subdued the internal threat from al Qaeda. Riyadh also began to cooperate with efforts by the U.S Treasury Department to sanction charitable foundations that were financing al Qaeda and the Taliban. The Saudi government also instituted new financial restrictions on charities, such as limits on cash transactions, foreign transactions, and multiple accounts.

Today, Saudi Arabia likely sees the battle against al Qaeda within the kingdom to be past its violent peak, but not yet over, argues The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Lori Plotkin Boghardt. Since 2008, a special Saudi terrorism court has prosecuted thousands of suspects charged with playing a role in the al Qaeda attacks of 2003-2006. In January 2016, the Saudis executed 43 men charged with supporting al Qaeda plots from a decade ago. (Regrettably, the court has also tried Saudi humanrightsactivists, including female drivers, whose activities the kingdom has defined as terrorism.) The individual most responsible for the kingdom’s aggressive approach to terrorism in recent years is the recently anointed crown prince, Muhammad bin Nayef, who built his reputation by leading the kingdom’s campaign against al Qaeda and surviving a 2009 attack on his person. The efforts of the crown prince and others demonstrate a new seriousness of purpose, although loopholes remain as Saudi Arabia turns its attention to the threat posed by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh).

Funding Loopholes Remain

Saudi Arabia’s position on ISIS parallels the kingdom’s hostility towards al Qaeda. ISIS leader Abu Bakr- al-Baghdadi has branded Saudi royalty as apostates. His calls for attacks on the kingdom have resulted in a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks. In 2014, the Saudis designated the Islamic State as a terrorist organization, which rendered any financial support illegal. Saudi Arabia has also arrested ISIS cells in the kingdom. Nonetheless, Saudi citizens who support the Islamic State and other extremists in Syria are finding ways to provide those groups with funding.

”There is no credible evidence that the Saudi government is financially supporting ISIS,” writes Lori Plotkin Boghardt, since “Riyadh views [ISIS] as a terrorist organization that poses a direct threat to the kingdom’s security.” Yet she notes, “Riyadh could do much more to limit private funding,” especially via other Gulf States that offer more permissive financial networks.

Senior U.S. officials have publically stated their concerns about terror-financing contributions routed through third parties. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a 2012 speech about combating ISIS, said, “the Saudis, the Qataris, and others need to stop their citizens from directly funding extremist organizations, as well as the schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path to radicalization.” Speaking in March 2014, Treasury Under-Secretary David Cohen revealed, “A number of fundraisers operating in more permissive jurisdictions – particularly in Kuwait and Qatar – are soliciting donations to fund extremist insurgents, not to meet legitimate humanitarian needs.” He explains, “Fundraisers aggressively solicit donations online from supporters in other countries, notably Saudi Arabia, which have banned unauthorized fundraising campaigns for Syria.” The recipients of these funds include al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as ISIS, Cohen said.

David Weinberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies laments that “Saudi authorities have also declined to take punitive measures against local preachers … [who] advised donors to circumvent local restrictions by sending their donations to accounts in Qatar and Kuwait.” Social media and crowd funding technologies have particularly made it easier for smaller donations to circumvent Riyadh’s policing of the formal financial sector. Cash transfers across state borders also easily escape detection. Boghardt concludes that “a combination of politics, logistics, and limited capabilities have impeded more effective Saudi efforts to counter terrorism financing.”

Incentivizing Saudi Cooperation

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry admitted in January 2015, “We all know that massive private funding goes to the extremist groups,” and governments must step up their programs to stop this. But it may be difficult to compel Saudi Arabia to more comprehensively combat the outflow of money to extremists abroad, since this goes beyond Saudi Arabia’s own concerns of domestic stability, which have been its key incentive to combat terrorism over the past decade. Moreover, many Saudis view Sunni extremists abroad as a bulwark against the influence of the kingdom’s rival, Iran. So as long as Saudi Arabia senses that the United States is seeking rapprochement with Tehran, it may resist pressure to more aggressively assist with Washington’s global counterterrorism efforts. While maintaining pressure on Riyadh to fight terrorist financing, the United States can also work to reassure Saudi Arabia that we will not ignore Iran’s regional aggression. Steps for doing so would include firm responses to such Iranian provocations as ballistic missile launches, as well as renewing Washington’s faltering commitment to the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, Tehran’s most important client in the region.

Please share if you agree we need to get to the bottom of this mess as soon as possible….